


we're the dream team

by kuro49



Series: television!AUs [10]
Category: Inception (2010), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 23:34:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3707505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t share my dreams anymore,” Raleigh Becket says, and there is a good reason for every word he chooses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're the dream team

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has been rewritten so many times, i think i need to throw it out into the internet before i try to touch it again.

i.

 

This is not an abstraction, you see.

This is tangible, the bright yellow-orange sedative gel pushing in through a pinprick that goes unnoticed. A drop of the chin, a touch of lashes against the cheek, and you’ve gone under. There is resistance because you’re going places with no grip, spaces without hold, parts of a shared dreamscape that slips into plain old nothing somewhere in the middle.

This is drift technology.

There is resistance because you only have half a mind as to what is on the other side.

 

“I don’t share my dreams anymore,” Raleigh Becket says, and there is a good reason for every word he chooses.

 

There’s the shore and frozen sand.

There’s the icy wind of a good Anchorage winter. There, and from right here it’s unmistakable, there’s blood soaking through his favourite sweater.

 

“I don’t share my dreams anymore.”

There’s dirt on his cheeks, and shadows looking more and more like bruises around his eyes. And it’s a fact that Raleigh Becket doesn’t dream much anymore, not if he can help it anyway.

“You don’t, you won’t, or you can’t?”

And if it means not sleeping at all, Raleigh Becket makes due.

 

It’s not a gun and it’s not a knife, it’s something Yance likes to call a plasma cannon because Rals’ head is his playground and Yance has never quite liked building anything anyone else has ever seen before.

He sees his lips move, but there are no last words.

 

“Does it matter?”

“I need a forger.”

“You’re Stacker Pentecost, there are plenty around for your picking.”

“Desperate times. Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket? Dream sharing is coming to an end.”

He is in a pristine suit, sharp lines and sharper eyes. Raleigh hasn’t seen the man for years now but that changes very little.

“And if you’re half of what you were five years ago, I can have you on my team.”

 

Raleigh Becket opens his eyes, and on the opposite bed, Yancy Becket sleeps on.

This is a memory of a dream gone bad.

 

“Five years, four months, Marshal.”

Raleigh doesn’t look at him when he finally answers.

Stacker doesn’t expect anything less.

“It’s been five years and four months.”

 

 

 ii.

 

There are some deep, dark places in the recess of the human mind.

It comes with the territory, it comes with the past.

And you would know, of course, you would. It’s not hard to have dark drops and blank space in place of good memories. That’s not all of it. Hell, that’s not even half of it. What you have is experience, what you have is knowing that it can be done.

When it really shouldn’t be done at all.

 

“Show me what she can do.”

 

Even though the conversation before this one goes like this.

 

“She’s not ready.”

And looking easily back at him with hard eyes is a man who is a father too.

“That’s not goin’ to matter.”

 

Mako builds.

She builds a dome on the shore of an ocean, where the waves don’t crash against rocks or sand but against the bleak grey walls instead.

She builds. Cityscape of a Tokyo not unlike the real one, it certainly resembles it enough to give it the name of New Tokyo. But there are lines in the concrete that don’t belong, there are flashes of blue in the peripherals of the eye, and reverberations that shake the ground from beneath the feet.

There is also a red shoe left in the middle of an empty road.

Mako Mori is an architect and she builds.

 

“What does it feel like, being on the other side?”

She asks him, when it’s just the two of them.

 

Because Raleigh Becket is not a name a lot of people in their circle forget. With their world closing in, she figures this is her last chance when his name is second to Stacker Pentecost, second in the sense that he’s been to the other side.

And there are many names for that too: the Anteverse, Limbo, the Breach, the list goes on but it all means the same damn thing.

(It means that you don’t come back from that place, not completely at the very least) but he does.

 

“It.”

He pauses for a long time, his eyes trained on a single spot on the walls with a strange line that splits the concrete in half.

“It feels a whole lot like being lost at sea, Mako.”

 

Raleigh Becket’s fixed point is a photograph. Of what? No one knows.

No one ought to is the professional courtesy.

 

“You know what you have to do, Raleigh.”

Stacker Pentecost might be speaking directly to him, but he is looking at her.

 

And because he does, he knows and she knows this too.

 

He pulls Mako with him as he falls.

 

(She screams at him until her voice goes hoarse.

It is only Hercules keeping a restraining hold on her that she doesn’t swing at him.)

 

 

 iii.

 

You all have a different name for it.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s all been strictly military at the start of it all. Where every trial is a test run with those Mark-I equipments that put enough men in their own heads with nowhere to escape to. You don’t make a name for yourself without a few secrets to add to the places in your head even the demons can’t get to.

This is the problem, you see, Raleigh Becket has been out of the drift for five years, four months.

Raleigh Becket has been out and he is coming back for this.

 

This is the last of them, minus a few more.

They call it Pitfall.

 

“Gonna need someone who can make a compound better than the shit we’ve been usin’.”

There are papers laid out across the table, and they have a barely legal brat with his ginger hair in a rat’s nest making the list.

His father stands just behind him with his grey Henley rolled up to the elbows, and his arms crossed over his chest.

 

Down under, where the Hansens are the best at what they do, they call it a headspace. And down in Oz, not a lot of people argued with what they want to call it.

 

“Think you know someone?”

It is the resignation, the man already looking like he’s got a headache that has Hercules Hansen knowing exactly who the Marshal’s got in mind even before he replies. This will remind Herc of a conversation they will have in due time. Because all they’ve got is Mark III equipment lying around, and not a lot of forgers know their way with one.

“Gotta admit, he’s one of the best.”

“Gottlieb would argue otherwise.”

Chuck Hansen just glances up from his list and snorts, “When don’t they?”

 

In Hong Kong, there are three local boys that go by Hu, Jin, and Cheung that run the side of the city bordering Hannibal Chau’s territory. And there, the Wei Triplets call it the dreamscape.

 

“Desperate times.”

He tells them, and ain’t that the truth.

 

Up north, the Kaidanovskys have it as their dreamspace.

 

Here are some of the first words Raleigh Becket hears upon returning with the photograph tucked into his pocket. The one that has been folded and refolded until the edges are worn but never quite going away.

“Sorry about your brother.”

Herc has his hand outstretched for a firm shake, his smile is thin but aren’t they all.

“Sorry about yours.”

(There’s a story, somewhere, about the Hansens and a man named Scott. There’s also one about the Hansens and a woman named Angela.)

“Don’t be,” Herc tells him, and his shrug is easy because everything else is already hard enough in these last days.

 

The way Mako screams at him seizes his heart, the way she struggles and snags a hand she can’t throw at Becket into his vest tells him just that.

Because this is his headspace and he knows who isn’t coming back.

It isn’t just Stacker who is lying still, there’s Chuck too.

 

As for the Beckets, well, they used to call it something else altogether before they lost one of their own. They are the cautionary tale in their circle, boys who aren’t careful in the drift.

Just as they are now.

 

 

 

Chuck Hansen tastes salt and what might’ve been blood.

Where the sand is frozen beneath his boots, his shoulders aren’t shaking even when he is drenched. He’s been washed ashore and the ‘dome standing before him looks like a fortress, reminding him of Mako and those murmured secrets from when they were younger.

Where his own father has taught him how to navigate through his head, Stacker Pentecost has done the same for her.

 

“Marshal.”

He reeks of the sea, and the man that slowly turns around looks nothing like the one Chuck’s set out finding from the start.

“It’s been a while.”

But beyond time lost within the Anteverse, Chuck Hansen finds his bearing, and there has never been a moment before this where he is certain of this one fact.

That this is the shot his father has taught him about, he pulls out twin sting-blades, and there is a bark from afar that has Chuck choking out something that might’ve been laughter.

“You look good, sir.”

 

XXX Kuro


End file.
